lecture 6: specialist browsers

Testing sites on at least IE, Opera and Mozilla is a start, but there are many other browsers than these. However, many users of the Web, even heavy users, have not come across them because they are designed for those users who suffer from various physical disabilities.

At this point it is worth mentioning another fallacious bit of thinking about our responsibilities towards other people. We are often encouraged to think of disability as caused by some kind of illness or injury. Of course, there are illnesses or injuries which happen to people and subsequently mean these people have special needs, restricted mobility and so on. But their dis-ability to continue to participate fully in many activities is not directly caused by their condition. Rather, it is caused by society's failure to allow for diversity. Is it the wheelchair user's "fault" that so much of the teaching space at Leeds University is not accessible to them? Also remember that we may move in and out of states of disability. Try getting to some of the Roger Stevens lecture theatres if you are on crutches after a broken leg! And how easy would you find it to use many web sites with a broken arm? (More on that in the next slide).

People with restricted mobility, vision etc. use special tools to browse the web. These are just alternative browsers, no (morally) different from Opera, Mozilla, and any other means by which the instructions encoded into HTML are interpreted. To write sites which are inaccessible to these browsers is to deny access to your site to their users. Put bluntly, it is discrimination, and against the law.

Across all 11 of these virtual lectures, there is only one slide on which I cannot show an equivalent of something demonstrated in the "real" lectures - and this is it. In the real lecture at this point I demonstrate the use of JAWS, a screenreader. JAWS uses speech synthesiser software to read pages "out loud". Several accessibility issues are immediately thrown up, such as what happens if images have missing alt attributes, how tables are handled, and the way JAWS deals with different tag types. I have tried to compensate for this lack by noting them down on this lecture's handout. If you can get hold of a copy of JAWS or similar software - and it resides on some of the university PCs - I strongly recommend that you try it out, if only to see a radically different way of interpreting your HTML which goes far beyond the trivial differences between visual browsers.

Do have a look at the pages on text-only browsing (which while not technically "specialist" browsing, does deal with many of the same problems at a basic level) and non-visual browsers. The handout also contains a list of other web sites which will give you plenty of advice on how to adapt your web pages to cope with special needs.